EPROM Coffee Table

Either in need of a coffee table or suffering a severe lack of upscaled electronics, [Darren] just finished up a great build for his living room. It’s a huge, scaled up version of a UV erasable EPROM with an infinity mirror in place of the fused quartz window.

[Darren] is using a similar construction technique by forming the legs of the EPROM out of laminated plywood. Since this build is significantly larger, building the entire device out of solid, laminated plywood would result in an unwieldy and expensive piece of furniture. Instead, [Darren] constructed the legs and sides out of plywood laminations, covering the ends, top, and bottom with plywood panels. The result is a hollow EPROM/coffee table that’s still structurally sound.

If you’re a bit confused after counting the number of pins on the coffee table, you’re in good company. This is technically a scaled-up version of a 16-pin 0.600″ PDIP, something that a quick googling suggest isn’t historically accurate. Maybe there was an EPROM with a 4-bit wide data bus somewhere in the annals of electronics history, but we’re happy with saying that a completely accurate scaled-up ROM would be far too big for [Darren]’s living room.

They made them, the most common example that jumps to mind is the UV erase versions of the OTP PIC chips that were popular in the 1990s. Prototyping for a one time programmable chip would be hard without a good emulator, so many OTP microcontrollers had a UV erase version for development, typically in a ceramic package with a gold lid and window. I have a number of 8 pin PICs with windows floating around, and even a couple tiny SMD chips with round windows covering almost their entire surface.